Could you be more specific? What kinds of drugs, for instance, are the trolls addled upon? Is there a dress code?
So people who attack soldiers and civilians are terrorists? You sure? You want to think that through?
I have to agree with those who are saying the anti-Cheney posters have missed the target on this one. The man has said and done plenty of contemptible things during his vice presidency - but this speech isn’t one of them. He was clearly speaking in favor of the Geneva Conventions. The line that’s being so widely quoted was saying that we’re better than the enemy because we follow the Geneva Conventions and they don’t (and this is clear from the text of the speech). Any argument that this is a statement against the Geneva Conventions requires reasoning that is - pardon the expression - tortured.
And personal attacks on posters who disagree with you aren’t going to change anyone’s mind.
There’s a significant difference in those two verbs.
Of course not, nothing personal about this stuff! We are intellects vast, cool, and unsympathetic…
I don’t know whether he was or he wasn’t. The issue is that he was scoffing at the idea of anyone demanding that some legal process apply to them, and given his history of trying to deny that process with lies and other malfeasance, it’s impossible for this not to go without comment.
Perhaps, but we had moved on from the OP to the issue of whether his contempt for other people demanding legal protection is itself contemptible or not, given his history, which IS at that point pretty relevant.
A man who has a long history of beating his wife just can’t so glibly make fun of wives who claim that they are beaten (portraying them all as liars and hypocrites).
In John’s case, he basically lied his way out of the thread with a big fuck you to anyone trying to debate it good faith. At that point, when someone has displayed an unwillingness to debate, I think personal attacks, in the pit are just calling it what it is.
Liberal’s case: well to know him is to have put up with him.
That doesn’t appear to be the case.
“These killers” refers to those defined in the previous sentence. Namely those who:
- we face in the war on terror
- are enemies
- who despise everything you know to be right, every notion of upright conduct and character, and every belief you consider worth fighting for and living for
Andf then he goes on to define the group he is talking about even further:
With his “they” so well defined, I don’t see what the problem is. Other than a misleading OP and a few of the usual knees jerking.
Indeed there is, but for present purposes use whichever: it makes no odds. Rephrase my last post if you like:
“So people who target soldiers and civilians are terrorists? You sure? You want to think that through?”
The presumption that the captured person is, in fact, a “killer”. Sure, that’s what a vile and disgusting enemy of Ameica would do, cry and whine for his “rights”, and his “Geneva Constitution”, other whiny ass titty baby shit like that.
Of course, thats also what a totally innocent person would do. In the vain hope of justice, at our hands, at our mercy.
What about the 99.99% of those we fight who aren’t invisible pink unicorns from hell? Has Cheney no words about how we should treat them? Why the heck not? They’re the ones whose hearts and minds we’re supposedly fighting for. This constant emphasis on how terribly bad the real bad guys are encourages our soldiers to abuse and alienate the vast and somewhat unaligned majority who reside in the lands we’ve occupied.
The Bushistas are past masters of conveying messages through subtext and impression, while weaselling enough to give themselves escape room as you have just demonstrated.
The paragraph you repeat starts with reference to the war on terror. The war on terror is a global term used by the Bush admin to refer to every military action they run in the Middle East. Regardless of whether it is in fact action against terrorists, a national despot with no significant link to terrorism, insurgents, civil war participants or political or religious activists. They are all just encompassed by the glib term terrorist, and action against them is glibly justified by the undeniable righteousness of fighting terrorism (regardless of whether or not that is actually what is going on).
Cheney’s speech is carefully crafted to segue from “the war on terror” into “killers” and their supposed attributes. He doesn’t say specifically that everyone the audience will be fighting in the war on terror is a “killer” and “terrorist” but he doesn’t qualify what he says by saying that merely some percentage of the people the audience will be fighting fit those descriptions either.
It’s the same overall technique that the Bush admin used for Saddam. They were careful not to say that Saddam was a terrorist, since they didn’t have the evidence to back that up. But in speech after speech the terms Saddam and terrorism were thrown around with gay abandon in close association, to ensure that the masses who were not (unlike you) carefully picking the speeches apart on a message board were left with a particular impression. And very successfully too, going by the polls subsequent.
In this particular speech, apparently not. perhaps because, there seems to be no confusion on how to treat those who we wold consider our enemies but who are not babrabrians who intentionally kiil innocent women and children just to make a point.
I’m far from a Bushista, but I can’t help but to decipher what someone says by referring to the words they actually use. You and others seem to admit that Cheney didn’t “say” anything bad, but you choose to read bad into it. Try reading it again, without hatred of all things Bush leading you from word to word. Seriously. It’s a good speech. If anything, it reminds the cadets that they are different than the barbarians and that they have high ideals to live up to and to be careful to not lose them in the heat of war—even against murderous, barbaric scum.
As far as your point about the polls regarding Saddam, I too find that troubling. But I put the fault on people who don’t pay attention. Not the person who never used words that some people hear. Surely our congressmen shold be expected to be able to hear things accurately. And they’re the ones you shold have a problem with, not the throngs who had no say in whether or not we went to Iraq.
Yes, if anything Cheney is just pointing out that the U.S. faces unconventional enemies is it “possibly objectionable” to label all of our enemies terrorists? Sure it is. That doesn’t in any way equate to saying "down with the Geneva Conventions!! Nor does any wording in his speech come close to criticising the Geneva Convention, in fact, to point out the negatives associated with our enemies he points out that they disregard the GC, he said it very much like disregarding the GC = bad thing for them to do. If he was trying to convey the message that he thinks the GC is stupid, that its prohibitions on certain treatment of POWs is bad or et cetera, he sure chose about the worst way to do it, in that he associated violating the GC with terrorists and our enemies. So in essence for Cheney to be asserting what people like Elv1s are saying, he would in effect be openly stating that he thinks we should act like terrorists. You can either interpret it that way, that in fact the graduation speech was a clever speech detailing Cheney’s view that we should behave like terrorists, or you can interpret it to mean he was simply stating the truth–that our enemies (whether they are labeled terrorist or not) don’t comply with the GC.
No, because he isn’t disparaging it at all. And you’re quite wrong, I “got the point.” The point was, BrainGlutton wanted to make a thread to start some good old fashioned admin bashing, and in his desire to do so, he deliberately misrepresented an event. It’s par for the course for many of the posters like BG, yourself, and luci to do that. It’s not enough for you to criticize when there’s clear evidence that is justifiably criticized, you also have to make any normal, non-controversial thing they say or do controversial and detestable.
You’re the worst kind of partisan, Goebbels-esque parrots whose minds only work one way.
BrainGlutton is hardly “some random anonymous poster.” If you can’t take note of his body of work and his frequent tactic at pulling this kind of shit to start another useless admin-bashing thread (even the ones based on their legitimate misdeeds are more or less useless at this point, the whole “Bush is bad” thing has more than gotten its share of space on the forums long before we start to delve into "invented misdeeds.)
Indeed.
“Good speech”. That’s rich, magellan01. IIRC, in post #72 above, I pointed out Mr. Cheney’s use of the words “delicate sensibilities”. That’s a poison pill, right there. That’s a preamble to an assertion (even if it’s only implied), that “them folks over there, they don’t count”.
A wonderful thing about implying something is that, because it only constitutes one half of a message transmission, the sender often gets plausible deniability of an ojectionable message. All he has to do is refuse any responsibility for inferences that are drawn in the receiving half. Those pesky code words (like “delicate sensibilities”, f’rinstance) can get in the way of that deniability, but there’s still an element of disconnect between the invitation to infer, and the actual inference.
(bolding mine)
Not only do you chose to say that he is implying something, but you even know what it is. Nice trick. Can you do this with everyone? Or just Cheney, Bush, etc.? If I were you: VEGAS, baby!!!
Try reading the words that are there and comprehending them before you go off into conjecture land. He was simply using sarcasm to point out the hypocricy of the very people he was talking about. Murderous, barbaric scum on the one hand/those with delicate sensibilities on the other. Sheeze.
Maybe you or one of the other Haters Of All Things Bush should just start a thread and have people sign it stating that Everythng That Any Person From The Bush Adminsitration Says Must Be Taken In The Worst Possible Light. Then you won’t have to either fabricate threads like this or post the same predictable, albeit sometimes entertaining, nonsense ad infinitum. I’ll even give you guys a motto: No Cortortion Too Great.
Enjoy.
You’re out of Goosestep, Mr. Hyde. How dare you attempt to divine Cheney’s meaning but using the actual words he chose and applying simple logic.
It would in some ways be great if we lived in a world (known as la la land) where everyone spoke in an utterly unambiguous and complete way, and everyone listened very carefully to precisely what was said and took no meaning apart from that, nor had to do so in order to understand.
We do not live in that world. Politicians know that. If you choose to ignore what they do, you will not understand how it is that they operate. Up to you, of course. Personally I try to understand how the system works, rather than ignore how it works because I don’t think it should work that way.
One of the key messages you convey by what you say is not what you say about something, but that you have said something about it at all. The explicit message Cheney conveys is that evil terrorists are hypocrites in claiming its benefits. This suggests that the soldiers he is talking to will be fighting is evil terrorists, which is very largely incorrect. What Cheney does not talk about (and therefore downplays the importance of) is that mostly the soldiers will not be fighting evil terrorists, and mostly the people they capture are not hypocritical in expecting to be treated well.
Originally Posted by Zoe
What? Oh!
My emphasis (emPHAsis) was on the wrong word and I violated the “Does Not Rule.”
(“Does Not Rule”: Don’t use the words * does not* when you mean to leave them out altogether.)
The sentence should read:
We are still a nation that rejects tolerance.